Haruomi Hosono was obsessed with American music. Growing up in postwar Japan, he ignored domestic artists and listened to foreign sounds broadcast by the Far East Network, radio stations operated by the U.S. military. One of his childhood favorites can be considered the most consequential track of his early solo career: Martin Denny’s “Quiet Village.” The song, which nabbed the fourth spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1959, brought exotica to the masses, ushering in new possibilities for sonic fantasy. “My music has always been fiction,” Denny said in 1998. “Everything comes from my imagination… it wasn’t about authenticity.” In the mid-’70s, Hosono was listening to Caribbean music but didn’t think he had the chops to make the real stuff. Exotica provided a way in—the freedom to be an amateur.
“Quiet Village” was an important reference point for Hosono’s second solo LP, Tropical Dandy, the 1975 album that inaugurated his “Tropical Trilogy.” What he liked about the song was what the rest of its global audience liked too: the vision of an entirely idealized place. Compared to Les Baxter’s original orchestral arrangement, Denny’s rendition was modest, featuring imitations of animals to conjure a picturesque landscape (the song was first performed amid croaking frogs, inspiring the creative decision). This scene-setting is the final touch Hosono added to “Nettaiya,” a remarkable soft-rock daydream that uses lapping waves as musical interludes. Over hushed ukulele he sings about Tokyo and Shanghai, Trinidad and Minnesota, the diverse locales serving as touchstones for an idyllic, eternal beachside—that is, until he complains that paradise is insufferably hot. Hosono’s take on exotica is both reflexive and funny, confronting listeners with its illusory nature.
“Let’s embark on this journey together before the Japanese archipelago sinks into the ocean,” Hosono writes at the end of Tropical Dandy’s liner notes. His mission, as he saw it, was to take music that traversed numerous countries and then add his own flavor. He dubbed this worldly style “Soy Sauce Music,” seeing his work as an extension of what all great songs did: engage in a rich and never-ending global conversation. The album’s opener makes good on that promise. He covers Glenn Miller’s big-band hit “Chattanooga Choo Choo” but sings it in Portuguese, riffing on Carmen Miranda’s version from 1942. You can hear the homage in the way his band lifts the scat interludes, but they also begin with a Sly and the Family Stone-like funk groove, throw in swing piano detours, and make space for guitar and trumpet solos. Even more, it’s suffused with the boisterous spirit of calypso music, especially because Hosono’s nasally delivery recalls the genre’s most humorous raconteur, Mighty Sparrow.
This displacement of time and style is at the core of Hosono’s music, and is an extension of what appeals to him about exotica. (“It’s fun how it feels phony,” he said in 2020.) But beyond a giddy penchant for experimentation, he repeatedly complicates simple authentic/inauthentic dichotomies and notions of directional influence. “Hurricane Dorothy” is named after John Ford’s 1937 adventure film The Hurricane—about a Polynesian sailor who gets imprisoned—and its lead actress Dorothy Lamour. He sings about the woman’s qualities as simultaneously Caribbean, Arabian, and Slavic, recognizing that false representation is easy to swallow when it stays in the realm of desire. Musically, it’s an updated take on Denny’s own exotica, but it also stands as a continuation of Hosono’s work in Happy End and Caramel Mama (later known as Tin Pan Alley). This was no longer just Hollywood nostalgia, but Japan’s own utopic artificiality.
Hosono wasn’t the only one making music like this in Japan. Makoto Kubota, who appears on the album and inspired its title (he called Hosono the titular phrase), released Hawaii Champroo in 1975. The LP was co-produced by Hosono and maintained a seamless, tonally consistent blend of Hawaiian, American, and Okinawan music. And while Tropical Dandy is purposeful in its genre-blending, it can feel like a novelty with songs like “Peking Duck,” which features a Brazilian rhythm, spurts of pentatonic melodies, and lyrics about Yokohama’s Chinatown and Singin’ in the Rain. Hosono’s music is a little miracle in this way, honoring the fact that ideas—musical and otherwise—are always circulating, mutating, and inevitably rendered as approximations. When the Peking Opera-style singing appears on the otherwise folk-rock song “Kinukaido,” it feels less like a mocking insult—compare it with Mighty Sparrow’s take the year prior—than an exaltation of the gap between the real and fraudulent. This isn’t because Hosono is shamelessly ignorant, but because he knows that music is inherently personal, and that one’s own experiences are a prism for everyone else’s—why try to hide that?
The most gorgeous track on Tropical Dandy thrives on such transparency. The spare, gentle samba rhythm on “Honey Moon” is dotted with tender hints of steel pan. Hosono’s band uses synths and guitars to simulate the instrument’s timbre, but it’s not quite right—and better for it. Getting a mere taste of these bright, chiming sounds leaves a craving for the genuine thing, which always feels within reach. But as he sings about swaying hair and relishing the twilight, the metallic sounds start to crumble. Hosono understands that exotica is all about dangling the impossibly, ostensibly real in front of you, creating a longing for something you’ve never known. He says as much on the gorgeously straightforward “Sanji no Komori Uta,” where he talks about putting on an old record and singing a song—a routine that serves as his lullaby. That’s all music ever is: a gateway to your dreams.
